Cheese, Wine, and Bread: Discovering the Magic of Fermentation in England, Italy, and France

By Katie Quinn

“Open-hearted and buoyant, the book weaves together her hands-on experiences in Europe and introduces us to a rich cast of people who make, sell and care about these traditions.” —Jenny Linford, author of The Missing Ingredient

In this delightful, full-color tour of France, England, and Italy, YouTube star Katie Quinn shares the stories and science behind everyone's fermented favorites—cheese, wine, and bread—along with classic recipes.

Delicious staples of a great meal, bread, cheese, and wine develop their complex flavors through a process known as fermentation. Katie Quinn spent months as an apprentice with some of Europe’s most acclaimed experts to study the art and science of fermentation. Visiting grain fields, vineyards, and dairies, Katie brings the stories and science of these foods to the table, explains the process of each craft, and introduces the people behind them. 

What will keep readers glued to the book like a suspense novel is Katie's personal journey as an expat discovering herself abroad; Katie's vulnerability will turn readers into fans, and they'll finish the book feeling like they're her best friends, trusted with her innermost revelations.

In England, Katie becomes a cheesemonger at Neal's Yard Dairy, London’s preeminent cheese shop—the beginning of a journey that takes her from a goat farm in rural Somerset to a nationwide search for innovating dairy gurus.

In Italy, Katie offers an inside look at Italian winemaking with the Comellis at their family-owned vineyard in Northeast Italy and witnesses the diversity of vintners as she makes her way around Italy.

In France, Katie meets the reigning queen of bread, Apollonia Poilâne of Paris' famed Poilâne Bakery, apprentices at boulangeries in Paris learning the ins and outs of sourdough, and travels the country to uncover the present and future of French bread.

Part artisanal survey, part travelogue, and part cookbook, featuring watercolor illustrations and gorgeous photographs, Cheese, Wine, and Bread is an outstanding gastronomic tour for foodies, cooks, artisans, and armchair travelers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9780062984548

Katie Quinn

Katie Quinn is a food journalist, podcast host, cookbook author, and video creator. Her food and travel videos for her YouTube channel, QKatie, always keep it quirky and delicious. She has appeared on the Today show, competed on Food Network’s Chopped, and was a judge on Beat Bobby Flay. She attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and is the author of Short Stack Editions’ Avocados cookbook. Before starting the QKatie brand, she worked as a writer for Serious Eats, as a video producer at NBC, and as a video host at NowThis. She lives in Italy with her husband.

Book preview

Dedication

FOR CONNOR

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

A Note to the Reader

Introduction

Part One: Cheese // England

The Magic of Milk

Just a Taste

British Cheese Fondue

The Cheese Shop

Call Me Little Miss Muffet

The Final Countdown

Scotch Egg with Potato and Cheese

Christmas Cheese

Stilton Reigns Supreme

Stilton Scones with Cranberries

The World’s Best Cheese

The Science of Melting Cheese

Pub Mac ’n’ Cheese

Up to My Armpits in Curds (Making Cheese)

Milkmaid Power Mammas

Let’s Talk About Cheese Toasties

Welsh Rarebit (with a Kick)

Let It Clabber

DIY Yogurt

The Changemakers: Bloomy-Rind and Washed-Rind English Cheeses

Cheddar Cheese and Tina the Turner

Cheddar Brownies

The Cheese Wheel Comes Full Circle

Part Two: Wine // Italy

From the Vine to the Bottle

The Comellis

Experience It Like a Child

Friulian Polenta

Tuffy

The Harvest

Spaghetti all’Ubriaco (Drunken Spaghetti)

It’s a Grape Party

Never Said Nebbiolo

Making My Way: Understanding Natural Wine

Rome: Learning the Language

Pasta e Ceci (Pasta with Chickpeas)

Zucchini Carbonara

Age Ain’t Nothin’ but a Number . . . Right?

The Fat One

Tortellini in Parmigiano Reggiano Brodo

Wine Rules and Non-Rules

Ciambelline al Vino (Wine Cookies)

In Vino Veritas

Family Roots

A Cake to Celebrate! (White Wine and Olive Oil Cake with Red Wine Buttercream Frosting and Boozy Mascarpone Filling)

Fill a Horn with Dung

The Clue to Everything

Arancini con Melanzane (Fried Rice Balls with Eggplant)

Land of the Vines

Part Three: Bread // France

An Audience with Bread Royalty

Simply Not So Simple

How to Make a Sourdough Starter

My Go-To Sourdough Bread

Where’s the Bread?

Remade All the Time

Susie Q’s Sour Cream Challah

Le Petit Grain

Bread vs. Flatbread

Ratatouille Khachapuri

Wash Your Hands with Flour

Getting Creative

Bread Inspiration Well

Sriracha Sourdough

Pane al Vino

Pain au Fromage

Walnut and Raisin Rye Loaf

Rosemary and Roasted Potato Loaf

Olive and Thyme Spelt Loaf

Sultana Fennel Loaf

Bouncing Around Boulangeries

Leftover Bread

Marseille

Sourdough Pissaladière (Sourdough Pizza with Traditional French Toppings)

Toulouse—But Does It Hold the Coffee?

Paysan Boulanger

Honey and Olive Oil Loaf with Einkorn

Hands in the Dough

Getting It Right

Acknowledgments

Recipes in This Book

Further Reading

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Photo by Joann Pai

A Note to the Reader

Cheese, wine, and bread, I think you’ll agree, are three of life’s most delightful things. They can be found worldwide, each place informing them with its own unique history and stories that extend far beyond the delicious dance on the plate.

I can’t possibly encompass all the locations, people, and cultural implications in this book, nor can I touch upon all 1,400 cheese varieties in the world today, nor the more than 350 varieties of indigenous grapevines in Italy alone! This is not an encyclopedia. Far from it. The fact that I adventured through England, Italy, and France to better know these foodstuffs—and myself—was the result of circumstance as much as research and strategy. I jumped into opportunities as they arose. The interviews I conducted and books I devoured went only as far as informing the experiences I lived. While everything I write about happened, and I am as faithful to my memory as possible, I have taken small liberties in terms of chronology for the reader’s ease.

These three locations and three fermented items could have been paired any number of ways. Cheese in Italy? Amazing! Bread in England? There’s an outstanding bread scene in the UK, in fact. Wine in France? A no-brainer. And how about cheese in France? I’m sure some of you will be dismayed that these weren’t the focus, but I’m sharing my journey, one of entanglements as much as connections and magic moments like fermentation itself.

Photo by Joann Pai

Introduction

Fermentation comes from the Latin word fermentare, meaning to leaven.

Leaven /′lεv(϶)n/ (noun): a pervasive influence that modifies something or transforms it for the better.

I have no memory of the entire week following the accident. I don’t even recall the moments before it, strangely—before my brain was hit the way a pneumatic ram strikes a wheel of cheddar cheese. I’ll tell you what I do remember, and what I’ve been told happened in those days.

It was my first ski run of the morning on one of the towering peaks at Utah’s Canyons ski resort, and I was still getting my legs under me when an unruly snowboarder crossed my path, a narrow miss, and I lost control. I gained speed until I went headfirst—sans helmet—into a block of ice and tumbled like a rag doll into a nearby ditch. My then boyfriend watched it all happen (which is the only way I have this information, and it feels foreign—like it didn’t happen to me). He ran to the crevice and found me facedown in the snow. When he rolled my body over, I was unresponsive and brown liquid was seeping from my nose. Cerebral fluid. He’d taken various backcountry first-aid courses and learned about those indicators. I was unconscious for about eight minutes—enough time for the medics to caution, She may be paralyzed.

On the way to the hospital, as the EMTs whisked me down the slope, I regained consciousness and illogically fought to escape the bindings—phew, she’s not paralyzed—that secured me on the bodyboard. My mom and dad flew from Ohio to Utah the next day and walked into my hospital room to find their twenty-seven-year-old daughter intubated and unresponsive, in a medically induced coma. By day three, I was awake and could respond but I couldn’t remember things as basic as my birthday; my traumatic brain injury prevented much, if any, recollection. You know that crisp autumn apple that goes perfectly with a wedge of Brie? Grab a bat and swing it at the apple; now picture my brain as that apple. I was in bad shape.

FIVE DAYS AFTER THE ACCIDENT, I WAS discharged from the hospital, but I was far from my normal self. The doctor’s notes indicated there was a blood clot on my thalamus (the part of the brain that relays motor and sensory signals to the cerebral cortex) and an abnormality in the midbrain extending to the pons (part of the brain stem). I vaguely remember moments starting a few days after the crash, like snapshots from a movie I might have seen under the influence of heavy cold medication. It’s a highlight reel of being pushed through the airport in a wheelchair, sitting next to my mom on the flight to Ohio.

During my first week at my parents’ house, I began to comprehend what had happened to me—why I couldn’t stand on my own, why I couldn’t walk without assistance. My mom supported the weight of my naked body to maneuver me in and out of the bathtub. I began to appreciate the erasure of my memory as a blessing.

LIFE HAD BEEN ROLLING ALONG splendidly before that. In the six years I’d lived in New York City after college graduation, I had worked my way up from the NBC Page Program—the highly competitive internship-like job made famous by Tina Fey’s television series 30 Rock—to get a job on the Today show, becoming chummy with the hosts, who greeted millions of Americans bright and early every morning. From there I landed my dream job as an on-camera host at NowThis News, a video news start-up. Always chasing the next big opportunity, I was looking forward to an upcoming several-months-long trip to Brazil for a video series about the food of the World Cup. I was dating a man I adored (but mind you, I fully intended on going to Brazil a single lady . . .), and my career was on the rise. Needless to say, I had a sizable ego.

Everything was perfect, or close to it, until everything came to a complete halt. The ensuing three months at home were composed of frequent physical therapy sessions and lots of chocolate ice cream. I attribute my recovery to both. The head injury most aggressively affected my vestibular system, the body’s balance center—it’s why humans can stand on two feet without falling over. (I fell a lot in those months.) Our brains, I learned, are miraculous little self-healing balls; they’re elastic—like a rubber band—and can learn, recover, and adjust accordingly.

Slowly, I pieced myself back together, and as I began to feel like myself, the first thing I reached for was my DSLR camera. I started to make videos using skills from my career—which felt like a parallel life somewhere in the stars—to investigate the things on my mind: love, loyalty, hunger. (Hunger both metaphorically and literally—I voraciously consumed food during my recovery. My brain was working hard to heal and needed every calorie it could get.) I was a foodie before the accident, and my curiosity about the role food plays in our identity, our interactions, and our traditions was piqued. I turned on the camera and started recording as I explored these interests. Those videos were the blueprints of what would become my YouTube channel, and eventually my new career.

The months in Ohio were my cocoon months, and I returned to New York a butterfly. The next couple of years were exciting: tens of thousands of online followers, flights to Australia and Thailand and Indonesia for video projects, and returning to 30 Rock and the Today show studio, this time as a guest rather than a script runner behind the scenes. If I thought my dreams were coming true before that trip to Utah, after the jolt to my brain I found a stratosphere that had felt completely unattainable.

The man I was falling for at the time of the ski outing, Connor—the guy I was definitely going to break up with before an exciting few months in South America—stayed by my side throughout it all and, a few years later, stood by my side at the altar as we exchanged vows. When Connor’s job offered us the opportunity to move to London, we strapped on our metaphorical skis and threw ourselves down the hill. Ready or not, we packed our bags and moved to England.

MY FINGERNAIL TRACED THE GRAIN LINES of the wooden table . . . back and forth. I sat alone in my London kitchen, lost in thought, the glow of a single lamp illuminating the darkness of a winter evening. I’d just finished a shift as a cheesemonger at England’s preeminent cheese shop, Neal’s Yard Dairy, and, having put my staff discount to use, I had swaddled a chunk of Montgomery’s Cheddar before journeying to my apartment in East London, stopping to pick up a deep brown loaf of bread along the way.

I now lifted my index finger from its fiddling, cut a thick slice of the cheese, and hugged it up against the pocketed sourdough crumb of a torn-off portion of the bread. I reoriented my body in my chair like it was a school desk and I an eager student. I leaned over the table and bit into the bread and cheese. An almost brothy savoriness from the cheddar, a sweetness from the caramelized bread crust, and a yeasty aroma hit my senses. I reached for my red wine, a ruby ambrosia I swirled in its glass before I brought it to my lips. I sipped, swallowed, and exhaled.

My husband, Connor, was elsewhere that evening. After a day standing on my feet interacting with customers and spreading the word about British farmhouse cheeses, I contentedly withdrew into an introverted cocoon and opened the book I was reading, An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. I sat cross-legged on the chair and delightedly flipped the pages to a section about cheese (in which Adler accurately writes, Cheesemongers are categorically zealous. Their counters are their pulpits, and they live to share their gospel. This woman knows what she’s talking about). I couldn’t help but notice how the title of the chapter, How to Have Balance, accentuated a woeful lack of balance in my own life.

I cycled through my cheese-and-bread-layering routine as I read, and subconsciously rubbed the narrow stem of the wineglass as though I were polishing it. I looked through Adler’s recipe for savory baked ricotta, the last line of which reads, Put bread and cheese, and whatever condiments you’ve chosen, on the table. Serve them, a salad, and not much else. Well, I’ve got the bread and cheese here. Don’t have a salad, but I’ve got wine—the three are all I need.

The next sentence hit me like an emphatic revelation: Wine and beer are the third member of this holy trinity of fermented things.

Whack.

I looked at the spread on my table and blinked as I reached for an uncapped pen that sat on the countertop. I drew a diagram in the margin of the book: a triangle pointing down. I labeled each corner according to what I saw in front of me: cheese in one, wine in another, and bread on the apex, facing where I sat. Cheese, wine, and bread. That’s it.

I’M NOT A HIGHLY CURATED, PICTURE-PERFECT human. I’m a quirky, line-drawing-scribbles person. Also, I would operate at lightning speed if I could. Thankfully, I’ve found an antidote to this haste: fermentation. When things aren’t moving fast enough for me, fermentation reminds me of the value of waiting. Feeding my sourdough starter every morning, brewing a new batch of kombucha weekly—at the risk of sounding like an unhinged hipster, these are the routines that ground me. The practice of fermentation is as old as civilization itself, but the splendor of it found me in my early thirties as I was settling into my new home.

Bread and beer, kimchi and sauerkraut, wine and cheese: all are examples of fermented products; many of our most common kitchen items are. Fermentation is right under our noses, but is only now entering most people’s awareness.

Fermentation is the process by which a substance breaks down into a simpler substance, altering food with microbes rather than by cooking it with fire. If this produces the most essential, delicious foods on earth, what can the same process do for us, as humans? Our lives ferment—we all have awkward, smelly phases along with delicious, robust ones—and mine certainly did, as I made discoveries about myself while exploring cheese, wine, and bread in England, Italy, and France.

The draw of these foods is that they take time to be transformed almost magically by the microbes within, which is a comforting prospect and a necessary antidote to our live-tweeting culture. For instance, when you post a photo on Instagram or Facebook, do you automatically refresh the page as the likes pop up? Imagine if you had to wait two weeks, or two months, before you could see the responses, but when you received them, those responses, although not instantaneous, were somehow able to endure, like a lingering hug or a letter that’s traversed an ocean to land in your mailbox. Rather than the quick high of a digital fist bump, you receive a warm embrace. To me, that’s akin to the satisfaction fermentation offers.

It’s what makes a bread of rich flavors that meld beautifully, presented as a pillowy braid or boule with a perfume of yeast, and is similar to how my brain’s neurons relearned how to fire together after my skiing accident (not an exact scientific parallel, but you get the idea). Both are time and conditioning working in tandem to create something altogether different and wholly incredible.

The crisis that accompanied moving abroad broke me out of my comfort zone to seek unfamiliar trades, poke my curiosity, and learn new languages to strengthen my connection with the people I encountered. Circumstance and intention can give birth to something wonderful, just like cheese, wine, and bread.

This book is my exploration of those three things. To me, this trio is life’s essence, a microcosm representative of its nourishment and joy. I began studying fermentation in order to dive even deeper into the things that fed my body—literally and figuratively. It’s with this realization that my story begins.

. . . CHEESE, MILK’S LEAP TOWARD IMMORTALITY.

—CLIFTON FADIMAN

My first year as a cheesemonger; ready to offer cheese—Try this! —to passersby

Photo by Jacob Harrell

The Magic of Milk

When I worked on a goat farm in rural England, the milk came pouring in via a pipe every morning at seven, fresh from the goats’ teats. In the evenings, more fresh milk was poured by hand into a large stainless-steel tank, where we fetched it the following morning. It was often my job to move the evening’s supply from the tank into one of the vats in the cheese room, handheld bucket by handheld bucket. A spout released the contents, and the milk was sometimes under such strong pressure from its own weight, it shot out like water from a fire hydrant across the length of the room. If I wasn’t quick with the lever, the milk sprayed upward and outward and splotched my face and glasses like a Jackson Pollock painting. That happened more than once.

Cheesemaking is a wet endeavor: you are constantly surrounded not just by milk, but subsequently by whey—the liquid by-product of coagulation—and then by water to wash the whole mess away. (Wellies and waterproof aprons are essential wardrobe items in the cheese room.)

As I sloshed milk from one basin to the next, I couldn’t have told you about the amino acid filaments ricocheting off each other inside the buckets as I jostled them around. Even as I dove my hands into vats of curds daily, I didn’t know the science behind what I was doing. A micelle, huh? A kappa-casein . . . is that a fraternity? It was only after I knew how to make cheese that I learned why it was all possible.

Everything else will make sense once you understand the basics, so I’ll start here, with milk. Jenn Kast, the resident science buff at Neal’s Yard Dairy—the London cheese shop I worked in—told me, Milk defines cheesemaking—microbiologically and enzymatically. Science was never my strongest subject, and I didn’t really understand the deluge of terms that subsequently poured out of Jenn, but after going through a cheesemaking boot camp with her, quizzing various cheesemakers, and spending many days with my nose in a book in the British Library, it clicked. And it’s awesome. Let’s dive in.

IT ALL BEGINS WITH MILK—THE SUBSTANCE of cheesemaking. The reason milk can be transformed is because it isn’t technically, in the strictest sense of the word, a liquid. (Yeah, crazy, right?) It’s a colloid, which means one substance is microscopically dispersed and suspended in another substance.

Think of milk like one big dance floor, where water, fat, lactose, minerals (like calcium phosphate), casein proteins (curds), and serum proteins (whey) are all boogieing to their own beat. We focus on the casein proteins to get the cheese party started.

On this dance floor, there’s no Macarena or Cupid Shuffle—it’s a party in which the casein proteins cluster together like the girls at a middle school dance. This group of girls is fairly diverse: a bunch of different caseins come together to form a micelle, a spherical arrangement of molecules. (In other words, a glob. It’s a glob of proteins.) The micelle includes alpha-caseins, beta-caseins, and kappa-caseins (and a small number of other components, like the calcium phosphate I mentioned, which helps the micelle keep its structure).

The caseins are hydrophobic—they don’t like water (or boys, to continue the metaphor)—they cozy up together in the center of the micelle, with kappa-caseins all around the perimeter because they have a filament (like a tail—a peptide tail of amino acids) that is hydrophilic—it likes water. In other words, the kappa-caseins, with their filaments, are the flirty girls standing on the outside of the group, the ones tossing their hair over their shoulders and eyeing the cute boys.

Since the filaments all around the edge have a negative charge, the micelles bounce off each other, ensuring that the particles stay suspended in the colloid, which is how milk can be a successful colloid. Until . . . we start to make cheese.

To do so, we need to disperse the elements of the colloid—to separate the curds from the whey. This can happen naturally (it’s the oldest method of cheesemaking known to humanity), because over time and with the application of heat, the harmless lactic acid bacteria that exist in milk—Lactobacillus, Lactococcus, Leuconostoc, and so on—proliferate and convert lactose into lactic acid. As the all-knowing DJs of this dance, cheesemakers do some things to speed that along.

A microbial starter, or starter culture, is often added to introduce the specific bacteria used to initiate the transformation of milk to cheese, and it can have a big impact on the final taste of the cheese. It can be introduced in powder form, although some cheesemakers rely on the lactic acid bacteria (LAB) in the whey from the prior day’s batch and add some to the milk to jump-start fermentation, a technique known by the oh-so-sexy term backslopping. The LAB breaks down the micelle by consuming lactose (a milk sugar) and creating lactic acid, slowly denaturing the protein (this is what happens when milk turns sour). Picture the dancers gradually dispersing.

The other way to coagulate milk is to use rennet—a complex set of enzymes. There are a few different kinds of rennet: the most traditional form is animal rennet (a substance found in the stomach lining of ruminant animals, such as calves, lambs, and goats), but there is also microbial (vegetarian) rennet, and some plant sources found in nature (like thistles, which were used to coagulate one of the varieties of goat cheese I made at the farmhouse where I worked).

Chymosin is the main enzyme in animal rennet, and when rennet is added to milk, the chymosin clips off the kappa-casein filaments . . . which was the only thing preventing the micelles from joining together. Without those tails, the micelles attach to one another like sticky balls, and that is the magic moment in cheesemaking; the transformation has begun. Those balls are the curds, and this is called setting the curd.

Lactic acid coagulation and rennet coagulation can occur simultaneously, with emphasis on one or the other, depending on the character of cheese the cheesemaker aims to produce. Lactic acid–coagulated cheeses are more fragile, with higher hydration—think of cheeses that are softer, less pliable, and prone to break into little pieces; rennet-coagulated cheeses are sturdy, drier wheels that are easier to transport (although they become more brittle as they age)—think of hard, rubbery wedges of cheese.

In physics, there’s a term from chaos theory that describes a furtive force that makes a pattern within a chaotic system: strange attractor. To me, rennet (or another coagulant) is the strange attractor in milk. It organizes everyone on the dance floor to clap and pivot together, doing the Macarena of milk.

Once the curd has set—you’ll know because it solidifies into a thick, custardy substance—it’s time to put it on its path to becoming the cheese it’s destined to become. In some cases, the curds are ladled into a cheese mold; for other varieties, the cheesemaker will break the curds apart—using their hands, a cutting tool, or machinery—to give them more surface area and therefore release more whey, tightening the curds. Sometimes the gelatinous curds are cooked by heating the whey to harden them and increase enzymatic activity. However it happens, the curds are removed from the whey and placed in molds, where they continue to expel liquid through the holes in the molds. Sometimes salt is rubbed on the outside; sometimes the wheel is placed in a brine bath. (Salt is used for flavor and to slow down fermentation by decelerating bacterial growth.) It then goes into a drying room for one to three days, and from there into an aging room, where it stays for anywhere from a couple of weeks (for a soft goat’s-milk cheese) to a couple of years (for a hard cow’s-milk cheese like Parmigiano Reggiano).

Not only does milk have unique properties that scientifically allow for cheesemaking, it also brings flavor components to the cheese. There’s a simple rule: the better the milk, the better the cheese. Many cheesemakers I’ve talked and worked with prefer using raw milk over pasteurized, because it better reflects the animal and its environment. If you know how to decode milk, you can understand the origins of your cheese.

Before the process begins, a cheesemaker is faced with innumerable decisions, each of which affects the end result. Which animal? Raw milk or pasteurized? Set the curd with rennet, or rely on lactic acid bacteria, or both? Use starter cultures? Once the curds and whey have separated, what temperature should they be heated to, and how much whey drained? How small should the curds be broken? Is the cheese washed in brine? Rubbed with salt? Eaten fresh or aged? If aged, for how long?

With countless choices, a certain mental ambidexterity is needed. Cheesemaking is inherently interdisciplinary: it is equal parts art, science, and intuition, explain Bronwen and Francis Percival in their book, Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese. One artisan I made cheese with, Joe Schneider of Stichelton Dairy, told me he loves the multifaceted craftsmanship aspect of shaping a product; he takes pride in being a steward of microbes. We’re bacteria farmers! he gushed.

All cheeses experience transformation, whether it’s from the lactic acid bacteria in the milk or the further microbial activity in a maturing wheel. The artisans at the helm—the bacteria farmers—need to keep the microbes happy: dividing and thriving. Ask anyone interested in zymology (the study of fermentation) and they’ll tell you that preserving foods in this way goes back to the beginning of civilization, long before humans knew the science behind the process. They put together the puzzle blindfolded.

WORLDWIDE MILK PRODUCTION BY DAIRY ANIMAL

SOURCE: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

The first cheeses predate recorded history. Legend has it that cheese was discovered about nine thousand years ago, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East, when a nomad transported milk in the stomach of a ruminant (what a thermos!), which is where animal rennet is found. Obscure myths aside, lactic coagulation is likely the oldest method of milk coagulation—and therefore cheesemaking—known to humanity, since it takes place naturally. (This would suggest that the earliest cheeses were fresh cheeses, eaten shortly after the curds formed.)

It was the recognition of the role of microorganisms that informed the procedures and allowed the making of cheese to become a measured activity with predictable results. There’s archaeological evidence of cheesemaking in ancient Egypt (3100 BCE), and The Oxford Companion to Food notes that cave paintings in the Libyan Sahara dating to 5000 BCE depict milking and what may also be cheesemaking. The earliest direct evidence of it, according to the scientific journal Nature, was found near what is now Poland, and dates to the sixth millennium BCE. Ancient Roman author and philosopher Pliny the Elder described cheesemaking as a sophisticated pursuit, and the ancient Greeks dubbed Apollo’s son Aristaeus the god of cheesemaking (and beekeeping!). This is all to say: cheese is one of civilization’s oldest and most prized accomplishments.

Now that you’re a microbe pro, I’ll rewind to where my transformation began, and how I fell into this vat of curds in the first place.

Just a Taste

I woke up bleary-eyed. Where am I? I tumbled out of the unfamiliar bed like a Slinky and my feet met the ground with a thud. Oh, right, London. We live here. Connor and I were shacking up in a pint-size flat in Central London until we found a long-term lease, and I was alarmingly disoriented. Okay, Connor’s in the bed. I’m supposed to be here. I slowly recalled the night before; we had the best Indian food of our lives in a humming, colorful restaurant, and the Chicken Ruby seemed to jingle in tandem with the vintage Bollywood music as it lit up my mouth.

It was the taste I had yearned for: something new, something different. We could have been in Bombay, until we emerged onto a calm street not far from Trafalgar Square just before midnight and saw one lone black cab roll by. We drifted in lockstep along the vacant path of the Thames River, amazed that London seemed to shut down at night in a way New York City never did. As we approached Big Ben, sturdy and significant, we felt like we had the city all to ourselves. Necks craned, looking up, Connor gave my hand two gentle squeezes, like a heartbeat—We’re here.

I gulped.

Didn’t I want this?

Living overseas had always been a dream of mine, but after we landed I had a visceral fear that my career was slipping away—or worse, that it had straight up evacuated the plane, parachuting into the Atlantic Ocean as we flew over. I had made the mistake of checking my email as we disembarked at Heathrow and saw a note from a producer at the Today show, asking if I was available Thursday to demo a recipe. Well, crap. This might be a tougher relocation than I had anticipated. It was Connor’s job that had brought us to England, and I had followed my love, but I couldn’t help wondering if that was a mistake.

Leading up to the move, I completely underestimated the changes that would take place in moving after a decade of living in New York City. What’ll be the big difference, anyway? Such a typical New Yorker attitude—confident I could handle anything. At that point in my career, I was a professional YouTuber—I made money from views, brand partnerships, and various video gigs buoyed by the growing success of my channel. I produced, shot, edited, and hosted; our little Brooklyn kitchen transformed into my work studio during the day while Connor went to his office in Manhattan. My set was anywhere I propped up my tripod, and my audience was on the internet; to my mind, my exact geographical location was no concern. The year prior, I’d lived in Paris for three months while I went to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu and kept a rigorous video production schedule, all without much issue. So, I reasoned, the transition to England would be seamless. Sure, there would be some fine-tuning, but most everything would continue uninterrupted . . . right?

Wrong. But this assumption remained unchallenged, largely because the months leading up to the move were consumed by wedding planning, and I was too stressed out by that to identify other areas of stress. We moved to London at the end of March and our wedding was in New York at the end of June, three months to the day after we moved to England.

During those pre-wedding months in our temporary flat in Central London, I’d uncork a bottle of wine right around five o’clock, before Connor got home. I’d finish emails and video edits while sipping on the sweet nectar of a Chianti or Sancerre, and by the time he walked through the door, I was on glass number two. When dinner rolled around, I mean, it was only normal to have some wine with my meal. I would offer to pour one for Connor and he’d curtly decline; in the tension of the transition, it felt like another little thing piled on top of the baggage we were about to carry with us down the nuptial aisle. Connor doesn’t love wine—he’ll drink it, but he’s pretty meh about it all. I love wine. On the list of my joys that Connor did not share, it was scribbled under number one: cooking (but above number three: baths). This weighed heavily on me as I fretted about a lifetime commitment. How can the things I’m obsessed with, the things I believe link us all as humans and are the lifeblood of connection and upon which I have built my entire career, be so unimportant to my person? I’m about to marry a man who would rather have cereal five nights a week than dirty multiple dishes! But I’m in love with him! Gah, life!

There are moments in cheesemaking when one of the main components goes rogue. It’s a domino effect, each problem creating others in a tumbling cascade. Take heating the curds and whey: a few degrees too high or too low can ruin everything. That temperature variation could be caused by a distracted cheesemaker, environmental changes, or any number of reasons. High risk, high reward, right? Therein lies the challenge of cheesemaking. It’s a fine line.

Fine, and sharp as a knife.

There are moments when an element in life goes rogue, too. It must’ve been the first week after we landed (I was still getting my sea legs) when I went on a lunch date with a cousin of a friend. Ten to fifteen years older than me, she was casually coiffed and beautiful. She and her husband, both Americans, had moved to London years ago, and she’d be helping me feel at home. That was the idea, anyway.

I followed her lead and we both ordered Earl Grey tea (so British!) and the roasted tomato and goat cheese quiche as she told me she had left her successful career (in what? I don’t remember) to follow her husband’s job opportunity in Hong Kong, then again when his promotion took them to London. Um, will that be me and Connor? His job was the impetus for uprooting our lives . . . But it worked out wonderfully! she said.

Even as I chewed, my sense of taste diminished. She continued, offering tales of adjusting to life in London, which she had now contentedly called home for close to a decade. A wonderful place to raise kids, she said. She was highly involved in a women’s group, coordinated her family vacations and children’s extracurricular activities, organized events for her Pilates class, delegated all home-related tasks to helpers; her calendar was always full, but she was happy to squeeze in time to have lunch with me.

Holy crap, is she a lady who lunches? I set my fork down. Are we ladies